


Smile and maybe tomorrow

by wordswehavesaid



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, no spoilers past the crossover episodes, really really fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-16 23:42:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3506984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordswehavesaid/pseuds/wordswehavesaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first realization isn’t that he’s in love with Barry Allen. It’s not even that he’s attracted to him. That all comes later.</p>
<p>It’s that he smiles with Barry Allen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smile and maybe tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Just taking a little break from my multi-chapter fic to jot down some thoughts. Enjoy!

The first realization isn’t that he’s in love with Barry Allen. It’s not even that he’s attracted to him. That all comes later.

It’s that he _smiles_ with Barry Allen.

Contrary to popular belief, Oliver Queen knows how to smile. From the wide, toothy grins he shows the public to the small, contained smiles he gives his team and family.

But never is it so easy as it is with Barry. Not just smiles, but beams that stretch across his face, chuckles and full-blown laughter that fills the space around them. In a coffee shop, about to train, after they’ve beaten each other black and blue—it doesn’t matter. He’d like to say Barry’s the sort of person that forces you to smile, but then it’s absolutely effortless what he does to Oliver.

He always thought that the smiles of someone like Barry, who does so so readily, lacked in value; something that you simply expected and hardly took notice of. But instead the absence of it is a loss he never seems quite prepared for. And Barry is by no means always cheerful, or even remotely happy with him. Oliver wishes that, like the others, Barry would simply go away in those times, run fast and far, because seeing all that— _hurt, fury, disappointment, concern_ —he feels it, too. He tries to send him away in those times.

Barry never leaves him for long. Alone he seeks Oliver out, tries again but better, and they talk. About anything, he told the younger man once, opening himself as a confidante. He never really has a choice, in the face of Barry’s earnest insistence, that this is something that goes both ways.

It’s never dragged out of him, though, what he ends up saying. The meaning behind earlier terse words and actions—with the thoughts and feelings and fears that are tangled up in them—are laid out for the other to hear and address. Because Barry never leaves him to struggle against it on his own, even the times when he thinks Oliver is already wasting more energy than it’s worth— _I think you’re full of crap_ —never dismissing his lost humanity, but the notion it was ever lost to begin with. And he feels free.

Free to open a space up in more than the foundry for the other man. Free to speak, with both vulnerability and warmth. Free to laugh, and to smile.

\---

Later, he’ll try and kiss the curve of that irresistible grin. It’ll be clumsy, lips not well-aligned, Barry will laugh against his mouth even as he’ll press against Oliver, and by the end there they’ll be; smiling and laughing through each successive kiss.


End file.
